It is difficult to overstate the importance and impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had on the employee experience. This is crystal clear when you see how employees are interacting with their IT departments. Employees expect technology to just work. When there are technical problems the expectation is that fixing the issue will be fast and seamless. An increasingly important part of meeting this employee demand is the virtual agent, or chatbot.

After switching to a different email address, I recently logged in to my client account to change the contact information my mobile company had. On seeing the email field greyed out and uneditable, I visited their Help and Support page for assistance. Live chat support was available. It was 9:31 in the morning. Someone was already waiting for me—Gie. This Facebook Messenger-based bot initiated the conversation with one of the more tedious stages of getting support: account verification.

What a customer takes home from a brand is the experience it provides. Gartner proved that customer experience is a game-changer for brands. In fact, 81% of companies1 expect to compete on the basis of customer experience in 2019. This head-on competition is driving brands to strengthen their customer experience strategies.

Website visitors are 82% more likely to convert if they’ve chatted with the business beforehand. These marketers share how to start those conversion-worthy conversations.

For CISOs the growing adoption of chatbots presents a challenge that needs to be addressed this year. They offer businesses huge potential for efficiency, faster customer service and improved customer engagement. But like every emerging technology, they also open up new attack surfaces.

Asking for help should be easy. And fast. Faster than typing out emails. Faster than opening chat windows and typing out the problem. And faster than opening an app and searching for the solution. Can your customers ask for help easily? And how fast can you deliver? Till recently, it was difficult to furnish this instant voice support in a scalable, accessible way. Then voice bots came along.

Live-chat is a stellar way to improve customer service and support success for any business. And increasingly, chatbots are becoming a way to automate vital business interactions with potential leads and customers any time of the day, even when workers aren’t present. Typically, to fill live-chat spots, you will need more manual labor. More employees and increasing overhead. But chatbots have proven themselves to be effective at solving most consumer inconveniences until a live operator takes over.